


scratch

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, Horror, M/M, Murder-Suicide, Serial Killers, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:46:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's been fixated on Sam all his life; it's no secret. It's only when Sam abandons him for normalcy that his obsession becomes something darker, more necessary--and incredibly violent. And even when Sam comes home to him, there's no guarantee that Dean will ever be the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. scratch

It starts on their two-month anniversary. Jess insists on staying in to celebrate. A few drinks and a cheesy Hallmark movie; he asks her why. “Because the last guy I dated for more than a month ditched me at the anniversary dinner _I_ paid for, in the fanciest restaurant in town,” she says, legs curled up on the couch, her head tucked securely against Sam’s jaw. “Staying in is nicer.”

Sam has to agree. He’d attempted to make a decent lasagna (keyword: _attempted_ ) and _sort_ of succeeded—it was edible, at least. They’d ended up scraping most of it down the disposal anyway, laughing when melted cheese strung itself to their fingers, and had made popcorn and cookies instead, and now the cheesy Hallmark movie has run its course, they’re into their third and fourth beers respectively, and the news is on simply because neither of them are feeling motivated enough to change the channel.

A car commercial winds down just as the gaudy _Breaking News_ banner flashes across the screen in blue and red, and Jess sniffs, shifts. Sam can smell her shampoo, vanilla and brown sugar, and blinks sleepily. Happily.

The volume is down low, the anchors’ voices only a faint battered sound. But their faces are dead serious, enough to make Jess wave her hand in the direction of the remote. “Turn it up,” she says, with a tiny note of concern.

_Manteca resident Andrew Christophers was found dead tonight inside a room at the Blue Sky Palms Motel, severely beaten and strangled. Police state that the room was not rented to Christophers, but to a man named John Wilcox…_

A photograph flashes up on the screen—a young man, college-age, maybe. Dark hair. A wide, high-school-prom-king kind of smile, white teeth and dimples. Sam stares at it, feels a gentle prickle on the back of his neck. Manteca’s not too far away, really.

He feels Jess frown and lift her head, and then she settles herself back against him as the photograph lingers on the screen and the anchors keep talking. He’s tuned them out now.

“Y’know, Sam, if I didn’t know any better,” Jess says—gesturing to the static-fuzzy image on the screen with the neck of her bottle—“I’d say that poor kid kind of looks like you.”

Sam reaches down to find the remote.

Well. She isn’t _wrong_.

* * *

 

Really, when he starts looking, it isn’t hard to find them. They’re in every bar, and he’s frequenting those these days, more than he used to—which is saying something. Everything’s gotten more tense since That Night, more tight and poised to snap, he’s found. Dad goes off on him twice a day now instead of the usual once. He feels a constant need to strip and clean his guns even though he’d just stripped and cleaned them that morning. A constant need for shooting practise, too—beer bottles on old crooked weatherbeaten fences, out in buzzing fields where no one can hear or see—even though he’s a damn good shot already, and he knows it. More cigarettes. Those are a new habit.

Sammy would kill him if he knew.

But drinking, mostly. There’s a serious itch in Dean’s bones that can’t be scratched by anything else. Hell—it’s been a year and a half since That Night, since Sam left, and it’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t feel quite functional if he doesn’t have a little whiskey in his belly, a little beer. He makes excuses—never a bad time to hustle pool, he tells himself. But he knows what he’s really in these places for, these rundown wooden shacks on the edges of places, gravel outside, neon and highway signs, girls in cowboy boots. The booze. And—more recently—the boys.

They must be a special kind of moth, or maybe he is just a special kind of light. Invariably they’ll wander in, with friends, with girls. Boys, eighteen, nineteen, slim boys with slim hips and big, pretty hands, with dark floppy hair and bright eyes.

And dimples. That’s important.

They’re easy to talk to. Sometimes they even smile at him before he’s even left his stool. He always smiles back.

Part of him finds it kind of terrible—that so many young men look so much like Sam. Kind of _unfair._ He’s always thought that Sammy is one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen, and these boys don’t even come close, but there are hints of him in them. Like chips of mica in a countertop or a tile floor. Glimmers.

It makes him _mad._

He doesn’t mean to drift into Nevada; he certainly doesn’t mean to drift into California. After That Night Dad forbade him from going anywhere near fucking Palo Alto, but, well, what Dad doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

In truth, he’s scared for Sam. A civilian life should be safe as houses but somehow he just doesn’t think Sam or any of them can get out that easily. He keeps himself from driving to campus and knocking on his brother’s door, but only just—instead he tools around towns in Palo Alto’s circumference, trying to widen it bit by bit until he feels far enough away to move on. There are plenty of bars in these places. Squat buildings with a single streetlight out by the road, hot sunsets, the feeling that the ocean isn’t very far away at all. And once he starts to notice these _boys_ , amongst the comforts of alcohol and nicotine, they just complete the package, don’t they. All the wonders of golden California. Good drinks, good views, good college boys who could be anyone’s son.

He’s in Alviso when he takes the first one home, and at that point it’s less about the fact that the kid looks like Sam and more about the fact that he really, really misses hooking up with guys. ( _A_ guy, really, but that’s something he’s trying stringently not to think about. If he’s honest, a third part of the impulse to drive to Stanford and knock on Sam’s door is the part that whispers maybe—maybe they could do the kinds of things they used to do, before That Night, maybe Sam would let him in to his apartment and his room and his body again, but—no.) So maybe it has more to do with the fact that Isaac ( _nice to meet you_ ) looks like Sam, after all.

They have a good time. They really do. Isaac has a sweet face and a sweeter body and he rides Dean’s cock like no one has in ages, and he kisses Dean sweetly, too, when they’re done. He takes a shower and his hair curls under his ears and his nose wrinkles when he smiles in the doorway, when he shakes out the sleeves of his shirt and says _goodbye_ and walks down to the road to catch a cab home, and the only surprising part of the whole night is that, for some reason, the sound of the latch clicking closed after him makes Dean absolutely _furious._

* * *

 

If you asked Sam, under the best of circumstances, the name of the person who knows him best in all the world, he’d say _my brother, Dean._ With a little sadness, maybe, if you asked him in his Stanford apartment, and watched the distance between them shiver down his arms like gooseflesh, but it’d still be the same answer.

Dean knows that, knows it even though the last time they saw each other they were in the process of tearing one another’s hearts open under the portico of a Greyhound bus station. But he also knows that if you were to ask him the same question, he wouldn’t be able to say _my brother_ , _Sam._ Because the side-by-side tally of Things the Winchesters Known About One Another would be one short on Sam’s side.

Dean is twenty-three, and he can’t really remember anymore how old he was the first time he killed a person. It can’t have been long ago. He remembers _who_ and _how_ , of course, but all other details escape him—day or night, summer or winter. All he has left is the feeling of their throat under his fingers in a back alley somewhere in Wisconsin and how _good_ it had felt to squeeze whatever insult or threat or harm they’d hurled at him out of their lungs and squeeze their life out with it, too. It was a man—older than Dean, tougher, but Dean is young and strong and he’d won that particular battle.

Dad doesn’t know, either. For a long time he’s kept it in check; he’s kept the beast tamed and locked away in some tiny cage in his ribs for Sam’s sake, for Dad’s sake. The last thing they need is him getting hauled in on a murder charge and having no excuse for it. But he’s slipped up, more than once. When Dad beat him black and blue on New Year’s Eve, age seventeen, he’d gone out and done it again, cornered some drunk deadbeat outside a gas station and beaten him black and blue and a little more, too, until the wet asphalt was littered with broken teeth. It had felt good. Like letting out a long breath. Giving a little of what he got. When he found Sam’s college applications in a manila envelope under his brother’s pillow he’d suffocated a bartender after closing two towns over. Nothing but his hands clamped down on nose and mouth. They don’t deserve it. He knows that. But there’s only so much satisfaction to be gained from shooting beer bottles on fences all hours of the day.

And—despite himself—he finds a certain joy in it. The power.

He hadn’t really thought Sam was going to leave them. Leave _him._ Hilariously, Dean feels worse about those petty murders than he does about what he and Sam had been up to, those last few years, with one another. All the secretive touches, sharing a bed when Dad was gone, rutting against each other in the early hours with their eyes half-lidded, Sam tripping off to school the next morning as if nothing had ever happened. Their little secret. No way Sam was going to leave _that;_ it’d be breaking some secret chain, some golden thread.

But he did. He rode a Greyhound bus all the way to fucking Palo Alto and left Dean behind in the dust, having let the most precious thing he had slip through his fingers like water.

But he’s kept it in check. He’s been _good_ about it. He’s been good about it for a year and a half. Sam’s a sophomore, now. He’s probably got a girlfriend. A great GPA. Dreams. Dean has drunk and smoked and pretended he’s okay and for the most part, he has been.

Until now. Until these _boys._ Until sweet-faced Isaac and the latch of his door.

* * *

 

He doesn’t mean to kill Andrew Christophers. He _really_ doesn’t. All he means to do is have one last good night in California before he books it to Maine or New Jersey or somewhere on an opposite coast where he can stop torturing himself and do his job, find Dad again and put Sam out of his mind for another year or two.

Manteca is a nice town. He finds a nice dive. Andrew approaches _him—_ moth to flame. He’s got dark hair, white teeth, a big smile, big dimples. And his laugh sends shivers of deja vu absolutely dancing down Dean’s spine.

It doesn’t take much convincing for them to wind up back at Dean’s room at Blue Sky Palms Motel, doesn’t take very long for them to be pulling at each other’s clothes in the slivered darkness, against the tacky cerulean adobe walls. Andrew is gangly and slim and has lean, beautiful muscles and he smells like soap and sweat and sun and he bites Dean’s lips, playfully, and smiles against his neck.

He doesn’t try to fool himself this time. He brought this boy home because he looks like Sam, and no more so than when he’s on his hands and knees on the rusty-springed mattress, shoulder-blades and muscles shifting under his skin, delicate moles scattered like stars, dark-haired head hanging down. He can almost pretend, with his hands on Andrew’s hips, that nothing has changed—that he’s holding his little brother in yet another dingy motel room and that they’re making a game of fucking before Dad comes back.

And it almost works. Dean closes his eyes, fucks Andrew hard and down, and takes his breathy noises and pictures them in Sam’s mouth, and all he has to do is open his eyelids a fraction, enough to see Andrew’s blurred and curving back, the drop of his head between his shoulders, before he’s clumsily pulling out and coming over his own hand. Andrew comes a moment later and collapses on his shaky arms to the scratchy bedspread and laughs a little, panting, and lets out a soft whistle.

“Damn,” he says.

Dean feels like he’ll stay the night. He hopes so. He goes in to take a shower, the trembling in his chest quieted for now, thinking that in the morning he’ll buy the kid a cup of coffee and drive him home and then he’ll put Manteca and California in his rear-view mirror.

Except—when he comes out of the shower, in boxers and a T-shirt, with wet hair—Andrew is putting on his shoes, and the moon is high outside.

Dean pauses in the bathroom doorway.

“You leaving?”

“Yeah,” Andrew says, running an awkward hand through his hair. _Short, long bangs, like Sam._ “Sorry, man, I’ve got shit to do tomorrow, you know?”

He smiles apologetically. _With dimples. Like Sam._

“Shit to do,” Dean says. He feels suddenly very hollow inside.

“Yeah.”

“Like what?”

Andrew looks at him, an eyebrow raised. _Just like Sam. Oh, no._ “Um—just shit. Look, no offense, but it’s not really any of your business.”

Dean swallows thickly. Something hot and prickling is building behind his eyes. His fingers are itching. He needs a cigarette. Or a beer. Or—

“D’you need a ride home?” he asks, flatly.

Andrew stands up, looking mollified. “Um—sure, man, if you want. I mean. Thanks.” That smile again. _Sam again._

Leaving. Again.

Andrew picks his wallet out from the tangled mess of Dean’s Levi’s and button-up on the floor, sticks it in his back pocket. Dean puts on his boots, numb. He watches Andrew move towards the door.

He doesn’t mean to. He _really_ doesn’t. And he isn’t even aware that he’s doing it until he’s straddling Andrew Christophers’ hips on the knobby carpet and his knuckles are bleeding, and he’s ploughing his fist into the kid’s cheek over and over and Andrew is scrabbling at his shoulders but can’t grab hold of them, and then Dean is hauling him up and hurling him into the tacky cerulean adobe wall and kicking him and kicking him until he feels his ribs break under the steel toe of Dean’s boots, and he kicks his pretty face in, breaks his white teeth and his pointed nose, and then he has the kid’s belt in his hands and it’s squeezing around his throat and by that point Andrew Christophers is probably already dead but he needs to be sure that no sweet-faced boy will ever, ever leave him again.

And then Dean runs. Wipes his prints, checks himself for cuts that might leave DNA beneath the boy’s fingernails, finds none. Calls in an anonymous tip at the nearest payphone and then makes himself scarce. Halfway to the state line before the news breaks; into Nevada by the time the morning comes.

* * *

 

Three months later Jess requests that they not have the news on while she’s over anymore. The constant talk of the serial killer they’re calling the Manteca Ghost makes her uncomfortable.

“It’s so gaudy,” she says, leaning over Sam’s shoulder to switch the channel to a game show instead. “People obsessing over this whackjob.”

Sam agrees, but he’s also intrigued. He keeps up with the story on his laptop while Jess is asleep in his bed, or during the classes he can afford to tune out of. In three months the Manteca Ghost—who has neither face nor name nor prints nor any evidence of existence at all, save the bodies left behind—has murdered six young men. All just under twenty years old, all in different states, all in shoddy motel rooms. Beaten, strangled, suffocated, sometimes a combination of all three.

The police have no leads, or so the papers say. Just a mounting pile of bodies and a wholly scattered investigation. _Like a ghost,_ that’s what they all say, _he’s like a ghost, he comes and goes._ The credit cards used to rent the rooms where the victims die are all fraudulent. All the names fake.

All the boys look, to Sam’s mild horror, a _lot_ like him _._

He entertains, briefly, the idea that the papers could be on to something. _Like a ghost._ But then, all the boys had been engaged in sexual activity just prior to their deaths, and he knows of no ghost that can fuck or be fucked by a person. Not without giving something seriously away. And no ghost that can cross state lines, can move from Manteca, California to Argyle, Texas. No.

He considers calling Dean, or even Dad, in case it really is something, some paranormal gig they can look into. But he doesn’t.

He goes to class, he kisses Jessica, he takes a weekend trip to the beach with friends and has a great time and tries his hardest not to think of young men with his face broken to pieces on a motel floor. He tries very, very hard not to think of any of that.

* * *

 

It becomes almost a _need_. Like some kind of spellwork. _Take the face of your beloved or one quite similar; beat until dead; choke if necessary. Once a certain number has been reached he will be yours forever._

He kills them in Minnesota, in Washington, in Florida, and he gets better at it each time. Keeps himself anonymous—just a face in a bar, just a guy looking for a good time. Sometimes they even stay until morning, and he brings them coffee and donuts before he holds a pillow down over their face and beats them bloody. Dark-haired boys. With dimples. With laughs.

He leaves them behind him like pins in a map, very small ones. Never anything too ritualistic, never anything too concrete. He knows how to become a ghost because he’s hunted them all his life.

It’s nothing personal. He assures them of that once they’re dead, bones crooked on the floor, throats full of their own blood and teeth. It’s _really_ not personal. It’s just something he has to do, a necessity he has to fulfill. Like taking out the recycling, like making a dentist appointment.

He’s just making the world repay him for stealing his brother away. For letting Sammy leave. That’s all.

* * *

 

Dad lets him go off on his own more these days. The filling of his quota has slowed in recent months, simply because they are hunting in populated areas where it’s harder to pick off a lone young man without it being noticed. And Dean is being careful. He doesn’t want to get caught. It would break Sammy’s heart.

Sam is a junior, now. Dean wonders what he’s studying. He wonders if, were he to drive to campus and knock on Sam’s door, his brother would even recognise him.

Dean reads all the newspapers and is glad to see that the police are still baffled, as are the FBI. He’s a little proud of that. The FBI, for little old Dean, who only wants his brother back. It’s rather sweet.

He kills a boy named David O’Connell in Arizona, who screams, “Why are you doing this?” through a mouthful of bleeding, swollen tongue. Dean wraps the boy’s belt around his throat before he answers. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he thinks he might even mean it sincerely. “I’m sorry. Just please don’t leave.”

He considers, once—smoking a cigarette out in some Nebraska prairie, a few weeks later—what this actually means. Killing men who look like Sam, who look like the Sam Dean remembers, who graduated high school and kissed him like an animal. He’s been telling himself it’s about being _left behind._ About punishing the people who are beautiful like Sam, who live like Sam, for giving Sam a dream, for taking Sam away from him. But for a horrible moment—and only a moment—he wonders if what he really wants, what he’s _really_ after, is the chance to beat Sam like that, to break his teeth and his bones and his dreams into little marrow-yellow fragments.

He shivers in the summer-night cold. No. That isn’t it at all. He’d never hurt Sam. Sam is his _reason._ Sam is his _world._ Sam is untouchable and safe and the closest he will ever come to Dean’s killing-hand is on the nightly news. And maybe, maybe, if he can just reach that magic number he’s sure is floating in the stars somewhere, that finish line— _balloons! confetti! congratulations—he’ll never leave you again!—_ maybe Sam will even come back to him. And then he won’t _have_ to do this anymore.

That thought gives him a shudder of relief.

He tamps out his cigarette on the asphalt of the by-road and goes, in search of a roadhouse or a dive, a pretty boy with a pretty grin who’ll be pretty when he fucks him and pretty when he kills him, too.

The itch is in his fingers.


	2. itch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time, place—maybe after midnight; Cold Oak, South Dakota, and here is Sam, pretty as a picture, kneeling in the mud, his eyes rolled back in his head, a big wet spot of blood over the middle of his spine, and he’s not breathing.

He’d be lying if he said he hasn’t thought about it. Even before that first boy in California, even before all that, he’d been imagining it—with horror, with anxiety, with morbid fascination—when one single human being is your sole responsibility, it isn’t odd, really, to conjure up a fantasy of their death.

He’s been thinking about Sam dying for a long time now.

It isn’t— _it isn’t, it isn’t,_ he stringently tells himself, as a mantra—a desire. He’d rather bite off his own tongue than take a hand or a blade to his brother. He’d rather go to the grave himself. Especially now—now that Sam is his again, sliding over miles of asphalt in his passenger seat, still stung raw with the death of Jessica but able to smile now more than usual, back with him where he belongs, blissfully unaware of the blood beneath Dean’s fingernails. It’s been a long few months. They’ve been good. He hasn’t had to seek out lookalikes in bars and roadhouses and street corners to take home and fuck and kill in absolute ages and he feels freer than he’s ever been, with the surety of Sam’s long, pretty body in the car beside him, and the certainty of his breathing at night across the aisle from Dean’s bed.

But he’d be lying if he said he hasn’t thought about it. Dreamed up a million scenarios in which something goes horribly wrong and Sam is snatched out from under his hands. He’s never the culprit in those dreams—well, almost never; and the times in which he is are tucked down hard in the back of his brain where he can’t think about them ever again. It’s always a drunk driver, a gun going off by accident, some ruthless illness, some botched hunt. Sometimes he’s lain awake, heart bumping, staring at the ceiling for hours, listening to Sam breathe across the aisle or into the crook of his neck, depending on how naked and hungry they’ve been that night, painting those lurid pictures in detail, unable to sleep for the idea of Sam’s guts slashed out against a wet street, or Sam’s head crushed in by this creature or that, or Sam’s twitching fingers splayed across the floor while his ragged last leaves him.

Oh, it’s disgusting. He knows. Disgusting and terrifying. But it’s hard to stop—hard to keep his breathing in check with those things in his head, Sam’s living warmth close by, all trusting and real. He hasn’t killed anyone in months; he supposes this is his substitute.

Except tonight, he doesn’t have to imagine; he can’t bring himself to imagine anything. There’s no time for day-dreaming, because it’s finally here. Time, place—maybe after midnight; Cold Oak, South Dakota, and here is Sam, pretty as a picture, kneeling in the mud, his eyes rolled back in his head, a big wet spot of blood over the middle of his spine, and he’s not breathing. His heavy skull is pressing into Dean’s neck and Dean thinks his esophagus has probably torn with how loudly he’s screamed Sam’s name into the thundering frost.

He’s been thinking of it so long it’s almost a relief, crouching there in the muck and mire with the corpse against his chest. It’s happened. Here he is. A rampant, mortifying relief.

Someone’s stabbed his Sammy. Someone’s done that to him. Some stranger hurtling off into the night. Saw their opportunity and took it.

He’d also be lying if he said that, way deep down beneath the lowest dredges of his heartbeat, he isn’t just the tiniest bit jealous.

* * *

 

After a while, Dean learns, it hurts to cry. His tear ducts feel stiff and rotten and coarse, so he stops. It’s useless, anyway. No amount of spilled salt is going to fix the problem of the corpse in the next room.

At least Bobby leaves them be.

He can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t seem to break out of the pacing loop he’s been in since they laid Sam out on this dirty mattress in this ramshackle shed. Sit vigil by the body, stand, walk, lean against the table, press against the wall, sit, stand, walk. Mourn. Sometimes he reaches out to replace an already-replaced strand of hair from Sam’s face, just to feel the coldness of him beneath his fingertips.

He made sure to lay him out like he’s sleeping. Hands against stomach, head turned to the right. It looks better that way. More natural.

The blood has stopped coming from the wound. The stain on the mattress is drying beneath the body.

When it’s quiet, when Bobby’s left him to grieve for hours on end, Dean sits and thinks, though there’s really nothing to think about, at the end of it all. His course of action has been clear since the moment Sam’s knees his that ground. He’s going to get him back. Like father, like son. But for now—

For now Sam is dead, and Dean doesn’t have courage in him yet. He only has the necessity of keeping watch. He’s even covered up the mirrors—some old wives’ tale he heard, once. Keep the soul from being trapped once it’s out and wandering.

He’s restless, unnerved by Sam’s stillness. He’s tempted, a few times, to grasp the corpse by the shoulders and shake it until it’s shaken awake, until Sam’s ghost is jarred back inside. He’ll have to find a crossroads before it starts to rot, before it starts to melt away into meat and bone that isn’t Sam, but for now he waits.

The old familiar itch is back in his hands but he can’t understand it now. Maybe it’s the grief, and God, but this feels like fucking Palo Alto, as if Sam’s soul has hopped a Greyhound instead of a golden escalator Upstairs, as if he’s staring at a mannequin instead of a stiff. As if—and he knows it’s wrong—as if all he needs to do to feel better is find someone who looks enough like the mannequin to die, brutally, in its place, and then he’ll be alright.

Old habits.

But no, he thinks—no, that’s wrong. It’s not his killing itch, not really. It’s a different kind. Something to do with all those dreams he’s been having, those waking, heart-bumping dreams about guts and wet road.

Sam will be back soon, safe and sound, once he finds a crossroads and makes the deal he intends to make. He shifts in his vigil chair. He’s dead for now, but he’ll be back. And how many more times will Dean have this—all those awful, fascinating imaginations, laid out in front of him, casual as a cadaver in a morgue? All his to look at—to wonder at—he wonders, now, what Sam’s long, pretty body is like, now that it’s cold.

Sam’s shirt comes off as easily as if Dean were peeling it off in bed, buttons coming undone smooth as anything, rolls over his shoulders like it’s nothing. The shirt underneath takes a bit of doing, because Sam is heavy and stiff, but eventually he wrestles it off—gentle, of course, real gentle with Sam’s lolling head. He turns it tenderly back into place, facing the right, replaces the strands of hair that have fallen askew. There.

Jeans, next, and underwear, and Dean swallows thickly while he works. He’s no necrophile; he doesn’t intend to do anything but look. It’s simple curiosity, really. He’s seen this body move, lithe and lovely living, and he wants to know if it’s still as beautiful dead. If its blueness and its chill will be bearable to look upon.

When he’s naked it’s the nakedness of an autopsy, and nothing more, and Dean stands there, hand over his mouth, looking down.

He’s so used to blood, to ligature marks and bashed-in skulls and broken teeth, on bodies that look like this one. So used to painting death onto high cheekbones and delicate clavicles akin to the ones lain out before him now. This isn’t his work, he thinks—not his style. If he’d been the one to murder Sam, if he’d been that hurtling stranger with the knife, he’d have done more than just slash and stab—he’d have done real artistry; only fair for someone like Sam.

Death becomes him so well. Fits him like a glove. This—near-instantaneous loss of consciousness, quick and dirty—this is too basic, too boring, for his little brother. No. He deserved something more personal, more intimate, for his sweet smile, his dimples, the hair curling under his ears; if he was meant to die that night he should have been murdered better.

“I could have done a better job,” he murmurs, almost apologetically, mostly to himself. He could have made it count, if he’d wanted to.

He’s angry. That’s what he is. Angry that he’d been perfecting the murder of Sam Winchester for years before that stranger had even heard his name. Angry that, when it came to it, it hadn’t been his move to make.

“I don’t wanna kill you, Sammy,” he whispers, crouching down by the mattress to touch the cold divot of his brother’s bare elbow. “But I could have done you some justice, you know?”

Sam, he realises, still never knew—never knew what Dean was, not even when they were reeling with each other’s bodies in those long months after Stanford. He’d never let it slip. Never had the guts to say _I’m a killer, Sammy. I’ve killed men who look like you, and I don’t know why I did it, not even now._ He’d been too afraid of Sam’s disappointment, his fear, his rage. Too afraid, as well, of the possibility of acceptance. Flattery, even. His baby brother is—was—is—such a pretty little enigma—loves and loathes in equal measure, fickle as tectonic plates shifting beneath the Earth.

But he’s dead, now. His empty ears can hear things like this, while they’re empty.

He sits on the bed, eases up onto its edge. Sam is cold as marble at his side, practically carved from stone, his gently-curled fingers pressing tiny dents into the skin of his stomach like some Baroque sculpture. Dean lets his fingertips trail, light as air, barely touching, down his face to his chest to the V of his hipbones, across the broad side of his thigh to the pointed bones of his toes, a whole anatomy still as glacier ice and all for him, with all the time in the world to examine.

His throat is too dry for anything but curiosity, and it takes some doing to turn Sam’s body over on its side, but when he does he sees what he’s been wanting to see all along—the handiwork. The wound in the spine, mottled with dried blood and split flesh.

He’s quiet, looking at it, one hand holding Sam’s body in place, his eyes drifting from the divots in the small of his naked back to the nape of his long neck to the spot where the knife went in.

Dean frowns. Sloppy, messy. Cowardly and violent. No grace to a killing like that, no coordination, just sheer strength and luck. That’s not the way _he_ does things. Or did them. He has respect when he takes lives, a certain brand of admiration, a _code,_ a purpose, and this?

Hardly worthy of someone like Sam.

Gently, he touches the wound—reaches out with shaking fingers to prod the broken skin, feel the stiff curdled texture of the blood drying in it and around it. It doesn’t come off against him. He could put his fingers in, if he wanted, if he were brave enough. Feel Sam from a different kind of inside. Touch the places where he’s been severed and cut away.

The body makes no sound when it comes back down into its reddish stain. It takes a long time to put the clothes back on again, but when he’s done he kisses Sam’s cold, cold collarbone, his heart calmer than it’s been in hours, the itch safely pulled out of his hands.

Bobby’s car is in the drive now. He can hear the rumble of the car outside. He takes his place against the doorway, looking in, lips chill with the brush of Sam’s skin.

He’ll be back soon.

* * *

 

When they leave that place, when the breath is back in Sam’s lungs and his heart is heavy with the knowledge of Dean’s contracted soul, much, much later, as they’re lying together in another faceless bed in the blue dark and Sam’s naked skin is shuddering with goosebumps and the insides of his thighs are sticky with Dean’s come and he’s just on the verge of falling asleep, he feels a hand against the scar on his spine, where his flesh is puckered and warped and looks to have been sewn up crooked, and he feels an inexplicable chill bouncing staccato down his arms, tenses.

He doesn’t say anything. Everything in him narrows down to Dean’s fingers there, tracing it, admiring it, almost. The hot graze of the barest tips of his fingernails against it, as if at any moment they’ll push, puncture, open the wound again, wriggle inside like worms to scrape at his spine. There’s intent in them.

Sam shivers, wants to vomit, or maybe cry. He can’t tell. Everything about this, the deal, the Gate, the pitch of his heartbeat, it all seems _wrong,_ so wrong, more wrong than a simple trade, and he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something he doesn’t know, doesn’t see yet, and its somewhere in those fingers, those loving, lovely fingers, and the breath against the back of his neck.

“Dean?” he says, softly, and just like that, all the intent and the fear is gone, and Dean’s hand comes up to rest against his side, and the adrenaline of his tension scatters down the small of his back like pinpricks.

“Mm.”

Sam swallows, thinks of crossroads dirt.

“Was it worth it?”

“What?”

“Selling your soul. Getting me back. Even when you won’t have me for long.”

Dean doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, but Sam can feel his eyes on the back of his head, eyes that know him better than any other eyes. There is a nameless dread unfurling in his chest.

“Yeah, Sammy,” Dean says, his hand hot and heavy and raw against Sam’s side, like a weight, like a sharp, sick, rusted anchor. He feels ill. Wrong. “It was worth it.”


	3. claw

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sam, I think he’s dangerous,” she says, her dark brows coming together, her body pulled in tight. She’s plaintive in a way that she never, ever is, and that frightens him.

There's a him-shaped hole in Hell and it's good to dream in.

 

He doesn't get much time to dream, when time even ventures down to him at all. Time is not a frequent visitor in Hell. When it does show its face he tends to wake up in the same place—blades in his hands, twisting meat on the rack, Alastair's breath on the back of his head, up to his shoulders in guts and bone.

 

But occasionally he finds himself asleep in the him-shaped hole, a nice little pit in the substance of the Pit that's just his size and shape, where he can curl up on his side with his knees pulled up and dream awhile. Dreaming's not the same, here—it's not sleep; it's just a marginal drop onto a side of the veil that is quieter and smells less of rot, and sometimes shadows move to put masks on their faces, masks of people he might know.

 

He keeps good track of his dreams. Sometimes when his hand is pushed inside a skull, scraping out the last of the brain matter to make it clean and gleaming, sometimes he tells the meat on the rack about them. _Dreamed about my father,_ he'll say, while the meat shivers and moans, pitifully, jaw working back against his wrist. _It was nice. He was teaching me to shoot when I was seven. I shot him in the face seven times. Once for every year. He thought it was clever of me._

 

There's a him-shaped hole in Hell and every so often, in his sparer moments when the meat has gone too quiet to be any fun and Alastair is away doing whatever it is that Alastair does, he goes to his hole and rather than dreaming he crouches down next to it and begins to dig a new hole, curled up and facing his own. Whatever Hell is made of is malleable to his whims; he's starting to get that. He's been down here thirty-three years and he's starting to get how it works. It all makes sense to him, inherently, the mechanics of unreality. He's starting to go smoke from the feet up.

 

He digs with his hands. He knows the shape he's making. It takes a long stretch to make the new hole, but he has forever. When time is particularly absent, he has even longer than that.

* * *

 

He starts off small. Simple meat. For the first few years he feels guilty. Always asks their name, their sin, to give himself a reason to start carving. But after a while—after hours upon months upon weeks of Alastair reaching over his shoulder to zip the meat back up and make him start again, Alastair gripping his jaw in his red hands and sewing up his mouth with a bright curved needle to keep him from caring so much aloud—all of those things stop mattering. They all begin to look the same to him. Just meat: bone beneath muscle beneath flesh, and organs in between, and endless ways to play with it all.

 

Alastair encourages creativity. Dean gets the feeling his students are a particular bunch. Now that he has been flayed raw for as many years as he has been alive, now that he has held each of his organs individually in his hands, including his heart, now he thinks he understands why the torturemaster wanted him so badly. He's got a badness in his bones and he has always liked the way teeth look when they shatter and he has always overthought and analysed and amused himself with the mannerisms of death. Alastair tells him sometimes that he's special—runs his red claws through his hair with something approaching affection—and he wonders how deeply Alastair understands him—if he knows all the details of what Dean was and what, beneath his tutelage, he continues to be.

 

Sometimes Alastair brings him a pretty piece of meat with dark hair and white teeth and moles on its tender skin and he wonders. He does.

 

When he's finished with digging the new hole, he thinks, he'll ask. He'll ask Alastair, student to master, if Alastair read anything interesting the day fifteen years ago that he pulled Dean's heart from his chest and opened it up like a book and examined every part of it in exruciating detail. _Anything about boys?_ he'll ask. _About my fists breaking young men's faces? About the time I tried to push my fingers into the wound in my brother's spine? Is that why you picked me? Did you see potential in there where no one else ever did?_

 

But for now he listens to meat screaming while he feeds it its own intestines, curious to see in what manner they'll come out of the throat, and in quiet spaces he goes and digs. He doesn't know, yet, what he'll fill the hole with. He's sure it'll come to him, in time.

* * *

 

It all becomes tedious after a while. The routine. Something's missing. It just isn't exciting to sling meat up on the chains anymore. There's nothing new or engaging about any of it, though he's listened hard to Alastair's instructions to think outside the box. Oh, he's tried—he's accomplished some real artwork, _he_ thinks—but it's just not the same as it was Topside. _Too much_ unreality. Here he can do anything he wants, but up there it was such a joy to be limited, to be perfect at one thing. He'd been so good at killing. It had felt so satisfying to feel the life go out like a snuffed candle and to know that that sweet boy would never move again, so _immeasurably_ gratifying to look at the mangled face on the motel floor and think, _this will bring Sammy home,_ and it had felt so calming to touch Sam's corpse in South Dakota. Good clean cold solid Death. But here the meat never stops twitching, and at the end of every day—whatever constitutes day anymore—it always comes back together, fresh and new and ready to be hurt again, and there isn't any joy in that. It makes him angry.

 

Alastair tells him to think of himself as an artist so he does. He begins a new series—he isn't sure what to call it— _Faceless,_ maybe, would be a good name. He starts with a chisel at the top of the skull and carves off the face and hangs it on a hook for the meat to stare at. It's easier this way—no need to wonder about the story behind the eyes, to bore himself with crafting punishment to fit the crime.

 

He learns how to mold the world to make the meat stop moving for a while, at least, and that's the best part of the new routine. Sitting back to watch the meat be still and cold until Alastair comes back and sets it back to twitching again.

 

The hole is almost finished.

* * *

 

But the facelessness begins to bore him, too, so he starts to work on the meat from behind, so he doesn't have to see their eyes and mouths. He's frustrated. There's only so much one can do with a spinal cord before it's all been done. He thinks that Alastair is losing interest.

 

Dean starts to take things back to his holes when time arises for him to dream. He takes a handful of clean white teeth, a scalp of dark hair, and one eye—perfectly hazel; he would have had the pair, but the second eye popped off the blade of his knife and rolled away somewhere and for the life of him he couldn't find it again.

 

He crouches down in the new hole and lays out all the treasures very carefully. Makes a sweet white smile with the stolen teeth. The Pit seems to understand. Sometimes he catches it bubbling up and molding itself around his trophies, forming skin or skull. He gives the hole a set of fingernails and it makes hands for them—perfect hands—he couldn't have made them better himself: long, lovely fingers, nut-brown and soft despite the work they do. He tells the meat about it, later, with pride. _I'm making my brother down here,_ he says, wrenching a pair of shoulder-blades out of place. _I miss his face, you know? There's a hole I'm making just for him, curled up facing mine, so I can lie down next to him and dream. He's going to be beautiful._

 

He's never stopped thinking about Sam. Not once in these thirty-six years. Not a single moment. He's vaguely aware that maybe _that's_ what's missing.

 

It's no fun, after a while, hurting _other_ people. Not even the ones who look like the boys he killed before. He understands, down here, in the same way that he understand the way Hell works, that there's only one person he really wants to hurt.

* * *

 

_Something's lacking,_ says Alastair, observing the work of moment.

 

Dean is feeling fidgety. He's got a tooth stuck beneath his fingernail that he wants to get out, and he wants to go see his holes. The him-shaped hole is changing shape to accommodate the way his body is changing, the way it's going charcoal and slippery. And the Sam-shaped hole is filling up with substance. He only needs a few things, now—a liver, the right collarbone, and then he'll have a copy of his brother, all for him, to do with as he pleases in a way he never had Up There. He wants to go see it; now doesn't feel like the time for critique.

 

_Your technique—your technique, Dean, it's exquisite, very—expressive, inspired, really,_ Alastair says, circling the meat, _but I'm not feeling your_ purpose _here._

 

Alastair stops, turning to him, stroking his chin with his red claws, and Dean shrugs.

 

_What is your—mm—your motivation?_ Alastair says, gesturing like a particularly snobbish critic in an art gallery, staring into him with his blank white eyes. _What's your—your creative_ drive, _here?_

 

_I'm practising,_ Dean says, without hesitation. He's been down here long enough to understand that now.

 

Alastair raises an interested brow. _Practising for what?_

 

_I want to kill my brother,_ says Dean.

 

He recognises that, once, he didn't want to do that. Once that had been the entire point. Killing people who _looked_ like Sam, because Sam was untouchable and sacred. But ten years ago Alastair had removed his heart for the eighty-seventh time and sewn it delicately to the outside of Dean's chest where it was sensitive and exposed and Dean had never gotten round to shoving it back in and so he's been feeling the rhythm of its beat against him for a very long time and it is impossible to lie to himself down here.

 

_I want to kill my brother,_ he says again, proud of himself for not shying away from it, proud of himself for admitting it at last. _I want to kill him like no one's ever been killed before._

 

_Why?_ says Alastair, with curiosity.

 

_He's too good for everything Up There,_ says Dean, with a steady voice, a smile. _He's perfect. He's the whole world. I love him more than anything. I want to kill him, so he knows how much I love him._

 

_Correct me, mm—correct me if I'm wrong,_ says Alastair, amused, _but hasn't he died already? Isn't that why you're_ here?

 

_It was shoddy,_ says Dean, coldly, _and amateur. I couldn't let him die that way. It would have been degrading._

 

Alastair laughs and the meat on the rack twists in pain at the sound.

 

_What are you doing in those holes, boy?_ says Alastair then.

 

_I'm making my brother,_ Dean says.

 

_To practise on?_ asks Alastair.

 

_I have so many ideas,_ says Dean.

* * *

 

The blue light comes before the Sam-shaped thing is finished.

 

Dean wakes up in a pine box, gasping for air, pounding against the lid. Dirt coming down through the cracks. This hole isn't shaped anything like him.

* * *

 

The real world smells of diesel fuel and Lysol and grease and exhaust and Dean has forgotten so many colours existed and he has forgotten what a hug felt like and when he buries his face in Sam's shoulder and breathes him in, really breathes for the first time in forty years, he smells sweat and shampoo and that black-haired girl on him and he never wants to let go.

* * *

 

He goes into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror and feels—off-center.

 

He remembers everything, but Sam can't know that. It doesn't feel like memory. It feels like a nightmare he watched through someone else's eyes. Dully, he remembers the sick black joy he'd felt down there, doing what he'd done, but it feels like someone else's joy, something to be horrified at.

 

_Was that really me?_ he thinks, pulling at his mouth with his fingers.

 

The worst is that, when he thinks about it, it _was._

 

And it was _good._

* * *

 

There was a him-shaped hole in Hell and now, up here again, there's a Hell-shaped hole in _him,_ and he can almost see it behind his eyes if he looks hard enough.

 

He wants to kill his brother.

 

He's beginning to realise he's known that all along.

* * *

 

“By the way,” Ruby says, as Sam is leaving her in Johnny Mac's, a dozen burned-out demons at her feet. “What's wrong with your brother?”

 

Sam turns, shoulder half inside the doorway. His stomach hurts from the stench of smoke.

 

“Uh—well, he just got back from _Hell,”_ he says, with meaning. “I'm sure there's a _lot_ wrong.”

 

Ruby bites down on her lower lip and twists it. All Sam can see of her face is that lip and the curve of her cheek and the glint in her eye that would look, if he didn't know any better, a little bit like fear, and not fear of the bleeding sky or the quaking earth or the cosmic thing that had dragged his brother up. New, raw, animal fear.

 

“That's the thing, Sam,” she says. “He should be _all_ hurt right now, you know? _All_ pain. But he's not.”

 

“He's tough, that's all. He said himself he doesn't remember anything about it,” Sam says, but there's no force in his voice, because he'd seen it, too, the moment his arms had come around Dean's body. Something different behind his brother's face.

 

“Sam, I think he's dangerous,” she says, her dark brows coming together, her body pulled in tight. She's plaintive in a way that she never, ever is, and that frightens him.

 

“You're crazy,” Sam says, pushing through the door out into the chilly unforgiving night.

 

The scar in the small of his back is starting to itch.


	4. rattle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean can think of at least twenty different things he'd rather be doing with his night.

 

Dean can think of at least twenty different things he'd rather be doing with his night.

 

Right now he is stuck. Several feet underground in some dilapidated barn or stable or something, alone—save, of course, for the shapeshifter silver-handcuffed to a post—because, like an idiot, he'd let Sam convince him that splitting up was a good idea, which, of course, it hadn't been—now he is here, and judging from the wind and the flakes of snow pushing in under the warped wooden doors, he is going to be here for a very long time.

 

At least until Sam comes.

 

Might not be for hours.

 

The shapeshifter is wearing some poor teenage kid's skin, at the moment, and Dean knows for an unfortunate fact that said kid is dead. He's up in the rafters, covered in hay that's probably soaking dark and bloody, and Dean had _planned_ to come back for him once the coast was clear and this shifter was extra-crispy, but he's stuck. At least the building is big enough that he can't quite reach the smell. The shapeshifter is also a mouthy little fuck, and Dean regrets leaving the duct tape in the Impala and the Impala in Sam's hands because he would kill for something to stick those teeth together. 

 

_Don't kill it yet,_ Sam had said, over the phone, right before the blizzard had cut out Dean's spotty reception.  _That's the only lead we got on the others._ And of  _course_ there were others. It's just that kind of night.

 

It's freezing down here, and there's nothing to sit on but the cold dirt floor.

 

He could be back in the room right now if they hadn't split up. He and Sam could be having a beer and getting handsy. Fuck, he wants that right now. Being too far from Sam these days makes him fidgety, like someone's rattling his bones all the time, or pressing a joy buzzer to the back of his neck. They could be settling into that warm queen bed, close enough to feel safe, breathing together at the stringent pace that doesn't give either of them room to talk about the angels or the seals or Ruby or the way Sam looks at him sideways sometimes.

 

“Ooh,” says the shapeshifter. “Kinda chilly, isn't it?”

 

“Shut up,” says Dean.

 

The shifter shrugs; Dean can see it out of the corner of his eye, pacing back and forth on the dirt floor to keep his blood flowing. The chain of the silver cuffs glimmers and slides like something serpentine. Dean had hooked them into some metal loop sticking out of the post, the shifter's arms raised above its head like it's surrenduring to something. If it's straining on the thing's body, it's not showing; it's resting against the post with its legs straight out and splayed a little, like a sulking teenager in more than just skin.

 

“Just tryin' to make conversation, man.”

 

“Not in the mood,” Dean says, giving it a withering look he hopes to God will shut it up so he can go back to thinking about how unhappy he is to be here. That, at least, is a little satisfying.

 

He scuffs at the edge of the barn with his boot, the sod wall rising a few feet above his head; maybe whoever had built this place had hoped to put in a floor, make a cellar out of this dug-in part. Unfinished business. He knows what that feels like.

 

It's cold and his jacket isn't nearly protection enough against blizzard winds slipping in through the cracks in this shit-hole's walls and the more he pictures that warm queen bed with Sam's warm body in it the bigger the jitter in his bones gets. They haven't been good lately, that's for sure—Sam's keeping secrets and Dean doesn't like it; it scares him; that girl Ruby scares him, though he'd never admit it. He has a feeling she's taking Sam away, somehow. Not physically, but somehow.

 

The shapeshifter sighs in the obnoxious way that an eight-year-old might.

 

Dean's knuckles are starting to go a little white.

 

One thing's good, though. He's tamed the Want. (That's what he calls it, now, in the private spaces of his head where not even probing Castiel can see. The Want, the Big Want, the Great Want.) He can wake up in the morning and look at Sam and the urge to hurt him is just a faint growl in his stomach that he could easily mistake for hunger. And he  _understands_ it now, too, the Want. It's not that Sam's done anything wrong. It's not that Sam doesn't deserve to live. It's not that he feels anything but love for Sam—if anything, he loves Sam  _more,_ deeper and harder every day, even when Sam scares him, even when Sam drifts a little bit away—it's simply that Dean sees the world going to shit faster and faster every moment, crumbling around them, and dark nasty fingers reaching for his brother. Death is protection as much as it is art and his job has always, always, always been— _protect Sam._

 

He likes his job. It is good to understand.

 

The shapeshifter makes a noise of boredom and Dean turns his back on it. He doesn't trust himself not to cut its head off before Sam gets here out of spite.

 

The Want, too, is in its own category of wanting. It's not like wanting a cheeseburger or sex. It's deeper than that, colder, more focused. Sometimes, Dean thinks, it almost approaches Purpose.

 

The shifter spits something out behind him; Dean hears the noise of its mouth, the  _pop_ of whatever it is hitting the floor. 

 

“If you don't sit still, I will gut you here and now,” Dean growls, feeling the muscles in his back tense in irritation, watching the white blur past the cracks in the closed-up barn doors.

 

“Just getting comfortable,” says the shifter.

 

And then there is an  _awful_ sound, like some great sticky mass sliding down a wall, and Dean grips the handle of the knife inside his waistband before he turns, just in case the stupid thing is trying to escape—but the teenage boy whose body is rotting in the rafters is gone. 

 

Sam is sitting there with his arms up and his wrists in the cuffs and his legs splayed a little. There's slimy skin-coloured refuse on the floor behind him and a bit of loose boy-skin stuck to his face and he flicks his head to the side until it falls off, and then he grins at Dean.

 

“That's better,” says the shifter, with Sam's mouth. It sniffs, settles, begins to rock its feet back and forth like an bored little kid.

 

“What the hell are you doing?” Dean says, slowly, hand still on the knife.

 

“Hey, we're gonna be here a while,” says the shifter, with Sam's voice, “and you ain't gonna kill me for a while yet, and I figure, hey, he'd probably like looking at his brother a little more than some dead kid the next few hours, plus, bonus, your brother's a looker. I'm bein'  _considerate,_ ” says the shifter. “You're  _welcome._ ”

 

It turns Sam's head, twisting Sam's lip, looking around the barn with Sam's eyes, fingers wiggling every so often inside the cuffs. Dean stares.

 

All thoughts about the Want and the warm queen bed go back sharply to their places. Dean angles himself away from the shifter in case it's planning something more—to lunge, break the cuffs, slip out of them, whatever—but it doesn't seem intent on doing anything else. It's got his attention, at the very least.

 

Wouldn't be the first time he'd shot the shit with a monster.

 

“Since when are shifters considerate?” Dean says, lowering himself onto the floor against the pole opposite the shifter. The ground is even colder than he'd imagined, but at least the wind doesn't fall down this far. He shivers, hunching up his shoulders, hand still wrapped around the hilt of the knife.

 

The shifter rolls Sam's eyes. It's disconcerting. Like watching a puppet of his brother move around. Sam and Not-Sam all at once. Makes him think of boys in motel rooms with broken mouths and belts around their throats.

 

“Hey, I killed some folks. Doesn't make me a total barbarian,” it says. Dean fidgets. Its voice is too oily to be Sam's, but on the pauses—sure as hell sounds like him.

 

He snorts, pulling himself back on track. “I'm gonna kill you no matter who you look like,” he says, cocking an eyebrow.

 

The shifter grins. Sam's big, joyous, summer-day grin. And then it fades to something sinister; a greyness behind the mirror eyes. “I know,” it says.

 

Something about it puts a coldness in Dean's gut.

 

The shifter narrows Sam's eyes a little, tilts his head; his fingers reach down to slide along the silver cuffs, even though it must burn, Dean things, it must burn to do that. It moves Sam's shoulders, rolls his spine, as if it's getting a read on him, as if it's looking past his face. Dean stares it down as best he can. The wind is picking up like crazy outside.

 

“You fuck your brother, huh?” it says, and that's not what Dean's expecting it to say. He almost laughs, feels his grip on the knife relax.

 

“Don't see what business it is of yours,” he says.

 

It breathes with Sam's breath and looks thoughtful, pulling its eyes up to Sam's forehead, as if looking inside his skull. “Mmm.You definitely do.” It opens Sam's legs a little bit more, as if it thinks Dean won't notice. He does. He swallows hard. “He likes it, don't get me wrong. Head over heels for you.”

 

“Quit that,” Dean says. “It ain't cute.”

 

“Hey, man, I can't help what's up here,” the shifter says, laughing a little, pointing to Sam's head. “Aren't you interested to know all his dirty little secrets? Sure would pass the time.”

 

“Not particularly,” Dean lies.

 

The shifter twists Sam's mouth in an ugly approximation of a pout. It studies his face for a while, and Dean looks right back, trying to keep his head out of the space where the Want lives. It's back there, humming the way it always is, aroused just the slightest by the thing in front of him—Not-Sam, but Almost-Sam, chained up, vulnerable.

 

He thinks about Cold Oak and open wounds.

 

He could really do with hearing the sound of the Impala pulling up right now.

 

His palms are starting to itch.

 

“Don't you want to know what he knows about you?” says the shifter then, very quietly, and it's looking at him from the sides of Sam's eyes, half-iris and half-silver-disc, flickering like snake's eyelids.

 

Dean's breath comes a little cold inside him.

 

“Sammy knows everything about me,” he says, mouth flattening, keeping his voice level, hoping the lie of it is keeping still under his tongue. “You can't shock me, you can't trick me.”

 

“I ain't tryin' to trick you,” it says, letting Sam's tongue rest between his teeth the way Sam always does when he's smiling, pink and soft, the way Sam always does when he wants to tease Dean in to kiss him—

 

“Shut up about it.”

 

“He knows there's something wrong with you,” it says, matter-of-factly. “He knows something happened to you Down There.”

 

“You're lying,” Dean says, straightening his back against the post. He can feel his jaw tightening, his heart pumping. “I haven't told him shit.” But there's doubt; it's there now. Fuck this shifter.

 

It's occurring to him that he  _doesn't_ know what Sam might know.

 

The shifter laughs. It's Sam's laugh. Dean wants to cut its head off. “Well, not  _specifics,_ of course, you moron. But he knows you're different.” It tilts Sam's head again, back the other way, peers at him in the discerning way Dean loves so much on Sam's face and hates so much right now. “He's starting to think you might want to  _do_ things to him.”

 

The itch is rising up the back of his neck, heart bumping in his throat. He swallows, grits his teeth.

 

“Hey!” says the shifter, eyes popping open wide, leaning forward, straining against the chains, Sam's big grin on its face. “When he gets here, should we ask him? If it's true? That sometimes he lies awake next to you and thinks about you—you, putting your hands on his throat—”

 

“Shut the fuck up.”

 

“You, sticking your fingers in his spine—”

 

Dean stands, one strong fluid motion, hackles raised, knife in his hand. It feels like it's buzzing, electrified. It's not big enough to take the damn thing's head off in one stroke but God, he's tempted to try—and not just because it's edging so close to the truth but because it's  _Sam-shaped—_

 

How long has it been since he's killed something Sam-shaped—

 

“Oh, he knows,” the shifter says, mouth twisted in Sam's wry smirk, like it's telling some kind of joke. “He hasn't put all the pieces together yet, but he will.  _He_ can't see what  _I_ see.  _I_ know what you are.  _I_ can  _smell_ it.”

 

Dean takes a step forward, feeling himself go to trembling, and he knows he's going to do it—he's going to kill it, because he  _has_ to, because he  _Wants_ to, and Sam is going to tear him a new one for butchering their only lead, but he'll understand, won't he? That doing this is going to keep him from putting that knife to the real Sam's neck for another week, another month, another year—

 

“I can  _smell_ the death on you,” the shifter says, grinning Sam's grin as if that'll save it somehow.

 

Dean cuts its throat in one motion, silver splitting Sam's sweet brown skin and the curve of his jugular and the black blood spurts out, on his hand and throat and face, hot and steaming in the frigid cold, and the flickering eyes go flat and Sam's mouth opens in belated horror—

 

But it's not enough. He wants to cut its head off, he Wants to cut its head off, he's never thought about cutting Sam's head off before, that has always seemed too barbaric, but he can always try it on for size, he can try it now—

 

And at least it will stop talking in his brother's voice about the terrible things his brother knows—

* * *

 

It takes Sam another two hours to drive through the storm to reach the barn and when he does it burns the muscles in his arms to wrench the frozen doors open.

 

The headlights pushing through the snow don't illuminate much, but they show enough.

 

“Dean?” he says, the name choked up in his throat.

 

Dean is sitting on the floor, next to a headless body, the neck a ragged mess of blood and bone, as if someone has sawed through it, clumsily, and for ages, and the belly is split, and the steaming intestines and stomach are falling out, pooled on the body's oustretched legs like meat at market. The head is cheek-down in the dirt. Its flat silver eyes are looking right up at him, in the doorway to the barn. It's his face.

 

Sam takes a step back, hand flying to his mouth to mask the stench, and Dean looks up at him, too, eyes just as flat as the shifter's, face spattered with thick black blood.

 

“Sorry,” he says. That's all.

 

Sam swallows hard, snow beating at his face, stomach lurching. The Impala is still rumbling behind him, waiting for them to climb up into it and leave, finish the job, but the job is gone from his head. He doesn't want to think about what is in front of him. He doesn't want to think about what it means. He wants to cry.

 

Dangerous, dangerous. He'd hoped so much that he was wrong about all of this.

 

He doesn't have anything else to do. He crouches, and climbs down into the dark with him.

 

 

 


	5. scab

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just when he’d thought everything was starting to make some kind of sense, here he came. Like a semi truck through a plate-glass window. _Not-Sam_.

He doesn’t hate the sex. In fact it’s the one thing, these days, that even approaches the feeling of _normal—_ however _normal_ he has ever been; however _normal_ they have ever been.

Truth be told, it’s all upside down to him. But at least when he’s on his back with his brother’s body moving between his legs it’s easy to pretend it’s all right-side-up.

Everything else—God, it drives Dean crazy. Just when he’d been settling in, just when he’d found all the right nooks and crannies of the house in which to hide the Want where Lisa and Ben couldn’t see, just when he’d thought everything was starting to make some kind of sense, here _he_ came. Like a semi truck through a plate-glass window. _Not-Sam._

It’s all like watching the world through a kaleidoscope. Like hanging upside-down on monkey bars, the way he had as a kid, until the blood rushed to his head and black spots popped at the corners of his eyes. _Uncomfortable_ is the word he’s looking for. He knows Not-Sam feels it, too, but he never mentions it. Sets his jaw and moves on; he knows there’s nothing else to be done _but_ move on, not in their situation. And Dean knows that, too. But it still makes him squirm.

But he doesn’t hate the sex. It’s different, just like everything else is different. The real Sam doesn’t like to be on the giving end, for one. Back when it was them, together, real and complete, it was Sam on his back on beds like this, and Dean kissing at his throat and digging his fingernails into his brother’s shoulders. Not-Sam doesn’t want any of that. Not-Sam is like an animal when it comes to this, all teeth and sharp angles, and Dean is surprised at himself for liking it so much. He’s surprised he lets Not-Sam near him at all. But he can never seem to help it. Besides—when his ankles are locked at the small of the doppelganger’s back—that’s the easiest time to let go, to close his eyes and picture the real Sam undoing him like this. The sounds and the skin and the lips are the same. That’s all that really matters.

He feels dirty afterward, true. As if there’s something under his fingernails he can’t quite pick out. Perpetual grime.

Not-Sam likes sex, and he likes scalding hot showers, and he likes to tell things like they are, and Dean is still trying—mostly failing—to adapt to it all.

He doesn’t like being forced to adapt.

He wants Sam back. The real Sam. Not-Sam knows it, too. But he just sets his jaw, moves on. Shoulders his way through the fog of Dean’s low-slung low-burning dislike for the _thing_ that’s replaced his brother. The _shell._ The _imposter._

But for now he doesn’t hate the sex.

* * *

 

They’re in Alabama, or one of the A-states. Dean doesn’t remember and he doesn’t care. Crowley’s monster-prison compound is somewhere in their rear-view and that’s all that matters.

He’s on his back on the sagging motel bed and Not-Sam is kissing his throat, hard and open-mouthed and sucking, like he wants to rip it open with his teeth and Dean has to admit he’s not complaining. He’s almost to that point of blackout where Not-Sam will dissolve under his hands and it’ll just be him, just him and his brother’s body, and everything fine, and no Hell and no Cage and no soullessness and no Want.

(The Want is a problem, now that this _thing_ is around.)

Not-Sam’s fucking him too hard, too fast; it’s more like brutalisation than making love but there’s no love here, anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. He’ll have bruises in the morning, hickeys that’ll raise eyebrows if civilians catch a glimpse beneath the collar of his suit, and he knows Not-Sam is going to smirk about them as if they’re a joke, as if they’re something to laugh about, and he’ll turn his eyes away just in time to miss the look of keen disdain that Dean will throw him. Sam never kissed him like that. None of his boys in those rooms years ago ever kissed him like that.

He’s pretty sure neither of them know what this is about. Why it keeps happening, even when they’re at odds like they are now. Why they keep tumbling into bed when it’s clear that their feelings towards each other are strange and mangled and unutterable. Anger all mixed with affection all mixed with the feeling of only having just met—strangers all the time, in all the same bodies. It’s rough and it’s raw and Dean hates himself for liking it and wanting it and doing it but he doesn’t hate _it._ All of it’s fucked.

Not-Sam drags to a shuddering pause and Dean realises it’s because his body’s gone limp with thinking, legs lazy and splayed, and he groans, rolls his eyes up and shakes his head, and Not-Sam pulls out of him and off of him and kneels back on the bed, his hair falling in his eyes.

“Really?” he says, with Sam’s sarcasm, and immediately the ugly feeling starts to settle on Dean’s body. He pulls himself up against the headboard, imagining the catch of the coverlet under him will scrape the grime away.

“Don’t feel like it,” Dean says, shortly.

Not-Sam sinks down, pulls his legs around, reaches down to take care of himself with short, lazy strokes, and Dean sighs, looks away, towards the black hole of the bathroom doorway.

“What’s on your mind?” Not-Sam asks, casually, over the slick sound of his hand. It almost makes Dean laugh.

He gets off the bed, rolling his shoulders, too aware of the sweat on his skin. God, he wants to rip his own flesh off, if only to feel a little cleaner. “Nothing. The usual.”

“You pissed at me?” says Not-Sam, interrupting himself long enough to hitch a harsh breath and—Dean assumes—come over his hand.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want it back.” He hears the bedsprings creak, hears Not-Sam ease his body off the mattress, follow him towards the dark hole of the bathroom door. “My soul. I don’t. That’s the truth.”

“Oh, I believe it,” Dean mumbles. He doesn’t bother to turn on the light—just reaches in to grab a towel and wet it in the sink. Chrome fittings liquid under the lamp in the room.

Not-Sam pauses, watching him wipe his body down in the dark.

“You hate me,” he observes, quietly, without pressure. “Because I’m not him. Not really.”

“You’re not him, no.”

Not-Sam smiles a little, leaning on the doorjamb, skin all nut-brown in the dimness—Dean sees it in the blackened mirror. “But I’d bet—when you look at me you still see your brother. You can’t help it.”

“I know what you are,” Dean says, dropping the towel in the sink, “and you ain’t my brother.” He reaches up to smear a line of sweat away from underneath his jaw, mouth tightening in the mirror.

Not-Sam shrugs, unperturbed.

“Doesn’t matter. Just makes us even. I know what you are, too,” he says.

Dean watches himself go still in the glass, hand against his throat, fingertips against his pulse. It’s slow and even and when he lowers his head, puts his palms against the countertop, the shadows fall over his eyes just right and they blow black. Artificial, but enough.

Not-Sam is watching him. Dean prides himself on being able to sense a person’s fear and there’s none coming off the body in the doorway but he can’t be entirely sure when, to his knowledge, the body in the doorway feels nothing, ever, at all.

Not-Sam shifts his weight to his other foot and flashes his smile again for one moment, a dark slash in his face. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You don’t have to lie.”

Dean pivots, slowly, on his heel, just enough to match his brother’s eyes in that unfamiliar face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

Not-Sam laughs, a short-lived noise.

“Manteca,” he says.

Dean blinks.

He’s wondered what it would be like, when it finally happened. When his little secret spilled, in whatever manner it happened to spill. He’d tried to picture Sam’s face resolving itself into shock and horror, tried to picture his reaction—pulling a gun, maybe. Calling the cops, foolishly. But this isn’t Sam, not really, and he’s not doing any of that. He’s just staring into the dark mirrored room with his narrow eyes and his black-slash twitch of the mouth.

“How do you know about Manteca?” he says, calmly.

Not-Sam tilts his head, just a fraction. “Me?” he says. “I’ve known forever. But don’t worry,” he says, leaning away from the doorjamb, turning to wander back into the room and stretch out on the bed, “your brother doesn’t know, not yet.”

Dean pauses, still standing in the dark.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Hey, you said it,” says Not-Sam. “We’re not the same. He’s—” He jabs a thumb in the direction of the floor. “I’m just the packaging, right?”

Dean doesn’t say anything.

“Okay, look.” Not-Sam holds up his hands, palms to the ceiling, like some half-cracked party magician introducing a trick. “He’s got blinders on.” His hands drop to his stomach, rest there, long-fingered. He looks up at the ceiling, cracks his toes. Dean has the urge to wash his skin again. “I don’t. Everything I see and everything I know—that’s permanent.” He drags a finger up his chest, taps it on his forehead. “He doesn’t _want_ to know, so he doesn’t. But I do.”

Dean folds his arms—comes a little closer into the light. His feet stay behind the threshold, his shoulder on the jamb in the dark. “So what do you think you know?”

Not-Sam turns his face to him on the pillow. His face is a mask. Patronising. “You kill people,” he says, like it’s a fact dropped in a game of Jeopardy. “You kill people who look like me.” Then, “Sorry,” he says, laughing, “my mistake. You kill people who look like _him._ ” His fingers tap idly on his abdomen. “There’s a difference.”

Dean blinks.

“And—if memory serves—you want to kill… _him_.”

Dean cracks his neck, side to side. It aches. His pulse is speeding up a little in his throat. He can feel it.

“And?”

“And what?”

Dean shrugs. “This supposed to scare me?”

Not-Sam sits up, like a jack-knife, all of a sudden. Locks their eyes together with robotic precision. It makes Dean’s spine rattle.

“Maybe it should,” he says, the soft suggestion of a threat somewhere on his tongue, and that raises Dean’s hackles, and he wonders why they haven’t risen already. This _thing_ knows more than any living thing should know about him and everyone else who’s known him for what he is has either swallowed their own teeth and choked on his belt or they’ve died, in bursts of light or pinioned on his knife. But not this thing.

Dean wonders if maybe he’s been waiting for this to happen, and he’s glad it finally is.

“Why?”

“Well,” Not-Sam says, stretching out his arms, “for one—you could shove that torn-up soul back in me and I can’t guarantee those blinders won’t fall off.”

Dean swallows.

“Correct me if I’m wrong but somehow—I don’t think you want him knowing what you are _just_ yet.”

“He wouldn’t know,” Dean says, blandly. “If he didn’t know before he wouldn’t know now.”

“Hmm.”

Not-Sam is quiet for a while, and Dean stands here in the dark, in the cool, unwilling to come out into the light where the ugliness will settle on his skin again, unwilling to come into the room with that thing. All his distaste is gathering on his tongue. He hates this thing so much sometimes. No better than any other lookalike he’s killed, on Earth or in Hell. Just another husk with Sam’s face.

“How do you think he’ll react when he figures it out?” Not-Sam asks, unfolding his legs, leaning back against the headboard. “Honestly.”

Dean doesn’t miss a beat. “He’ll call me a monster,” he says.

It’s only true, after all.

Not-Sam laughs at that. “I love how that word gets tossed around. You’re not a monster.” He rolls his head, keeps his eyes. “You’re a human being. You’re a lot more like me than you think.”

“I’ve got a soul.”

A smirk. “That only makes it worse.”

Not-Sam sighs, relaxes, as if this conversation isn’t happening, as if there’s no danger electrifying the space between them, sparking against the doorjamb where Dean’s leaning. It’s bizarre. Kaleidoscope. Dean wonders, only vaguely, if he’s dreaming.

“Do you want to kill me?” Not-Sam asks, then, very softly, after a long quiet.

No point in lying.

“Yeah.”

“Mm. See—but you can’t, can you? Even though you wish you could.” Not-Sam runs a hand back through his hair the way Sam always did and it makes a growl rise and die in Dean’s throat, jealousy, anger. “We’re too much alike. We’re just things that kill other things. It’d be like killing yourself.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Dean says, with equal quiet.

“I’m not judging you, Dean,” Not-Sam says, shifting, again, to sit on the edge of the bed, to face him and look at him, body open, like a friend or a lover, and Dean reminds himself strictly that he’s neither. “I’m just telling you what I know. I might not understand it. But I’m respecting it.” He pauses, licks his lips, like he’s hungry, like he wants to sink his teeth into Dean’s neck, and he probably does, and Dean stays in the dark. “Would Sam do that?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Dean says, hard and bitter. He doesn’t like this, suddenly, this dialogue. He doesn’t like this situation. He doesn’t like tonight. It came on too fast, and he hasn’t thought about any of this in so long, hasn’t felt his killing hand itch so badly in months. At least until now.

Not-Sam moves off the bed in one fluid motion, too much grace in a thing like that, and he’s in Dean’s space so quickly he’s almost startled back into the blackness, and Not-Sam reaches down and grips his hands and pulls them up, settles them around his throat, thumbs against his Adam’s apple, and he holds Dean’s wrists there, locked around his neck.

“I’m more like him than you think, too,” he says, so close to Dean’s mouth Dean can taste his breath, and he can’t help it—he squeezes, just a little, fingers tightening—watches Not-Sam’s mouth fall open as his hands close, as his airway constricts, little by little by little—half-in, half-out of the light, and Dean wonders if his eyes are still in shadow—he doesn’t know what that means, _I’m more like him_ , but he doesn’t ask. Feels a vine of heat twining up around his spine and pulls Not-Sam into the blackened bathroom and kisses the air right out of his mouth and squeezes his throat tight, tighter, until his back is against the wall and Not-Sam yanks his hands off with a wrenching grab and feels down in the dark between them for Dean’s cock.

Even in the dark Dean can see the imprints of his fingers lingering on the skin of that throat.

“Why?” Dean gasps, into his brother’s hollow mouth, and he knows Not-Sam gets the longer version of the question. _Why did you tell me all of that? Why did you let that slip?_

“You have to admit what you are,” Not-Sam mumbles against his lower lip, all teeth and flickering tongue, all hands down there. “That’s the only way this works—that’s the only way—we get to keep each other—”

Dean plants his hands flat on the doppelganger’s chest and shoves, pushing him away hard, hard enough to stumble into the corner of the shower wall and stop, startled and interrupted.

“I don’t _belong_ to you,” Dean hisses, wiping saliva from his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t _want_ you.”

He leaves the bathroom, leaves him in there, a shape in the dark.

“I’d kill you if I could,” Dean snaps back at him, and there’s no answer. Just the snap of the light in the room going off when Dean turns the switch.

Nothing else moves.

* * *

 

“Is he ever gonna wake up?”

“I’m not a human doctor, Dean.”

Dean’s not looking at him, not really. Behind him is what matters. Sam— _whole,_ and here, and Sam—hooked up to the IV above the panic room cot. He can still smell the ozone of his soul in the air.

“Could you take a guess?”

Castiel sighs, glances back at Sam’s prone body. Works his jaw. “Okay. Probably not.”

Dean scoffs. “Oh, well, don’t sugarcoat it.”

“I’m sorry, Dean, but I warned you not to put that thing back inside him.”

_Thing._ The only _thing_ Dean can think of in this room is the dead one—the thing that flared out once Sam’s soul lit everything up. The thing that knew.

“What was I supposed to do?” Dean says, holding his joy back behind his tongue, his satisfaction, knowing that he’s safe again. That isn’t something Cas needs to hear. He keeps his voice hard. “Let T-1000 walk around, hope he doesn’t open fire?”

Castiel pushes up towards his face, so close Dean flinches. The angel’s expression makes his blood a little cold.

“Let me tell you what his soul felt like when I touched it,” he says, ice-blue eyes boring into his skull. “Like it had been skinned alive, Dean.”

Dean looks away from him—back towards Sam, lying in that bed, dreaming, maybe. But _back,_ here, with him, where he belongs, intact, and everything’s right-side-up again. No more doppelgangers, Dean thinks. Resolves. No more lookalikes. Just Sam, and things the way they should be.

Want, cradled back behind his teeth.

Cas makes a noise of discontent inside his throat.

“If you wanted to kill your brother you should have done it outright,” he says.

Then he’s gone.


	6. raze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When he slides into the car next to his brother, who has just spoken more words to him in five minutes than he has in a long time, he thinks he catches a flash of black in his own green eyes in the rear-view mirror, and he knows that it's just about time.

_“911. What is your emergency?”_

 

_He feels like he's being choked. He's never smelled so much copper in his life. It's in his mouth, his nose, his throat. He can feel the blood on his hands drooling down his skin, seeping into the cracks of the casing of the cell phone pressed against his face. He can barely make out the voice of the woman on the other end; his head is too full of the sound of air squeaking through a clamped-down windpipe._

 

_“I killed my brother,” he says._

* * *

 

Sam—he doesn't talk much lately. He's walking, he's awake, and even though he's seeing things, Dean tells himself that, surely, he's on the up-and-up; the further they drive from the place in which his soul had shattered and come back together, the further they drive from the memory of Cas drowning in that slick black reservoir, the taller he sits, the more he eats, the better he sleeps. But he doesn't talk much. Doesn't laugh much.

 

Dean assumes—because it would be insensitive to ask, he feels—that it's just Hell. All that shit is flooding his brother's brain the way it flooded his own, years ago. He doesn't ask, because, frankly, he doesn't want to know. He doesn't ask because he's afraid that What Sam Saw will match up too closely with What Dean Felt, in his hole in the Pit.

 

He doesn't ask because he doesn't know how much _Sam_ knows, now that he's all in one piece again.

* * *

 

Dean's always been good at feeling fate stirring in the air. He'd known in his bones that something was up for months before Sam left him for Stanford. He prides himself—secretly, of course—on being able to sense when things are _right._ The magic formula he'd followed all those years Sam was in school, the quota of dead boys in motel rooms. The universal permission to undress his brother's corpse and imagine touching his spine through that open wound. That mental _click_ in Hell. All of it. They're speeding out of Michigan, and two hours ago Sam had smiled at him over an open bottle of beer and said that he felt good, that he was pushing past the fog and the hurt, and for an instant Dean got that twinge, that right-hand itch. 

 

He hasn't forgotten it. When he slides into the car next to his brother, who has just spoken more words to him in five minutes than he has in a long time, he thinks he catches a flash of black in his own green eyes in the rear-view mirror, and he knows that it's just about time.

* * *

 

It's a lonesome motel on the back edge of nowhere, the only thing for miles on the westbound interstate. A long way back behind it the woods begin. Sam watches the traffic slide by, bright lights in the dark, while Dean checks them in.

 

He's been quiet since Michigan. Dead quiet. Dean's been watching him in the mirror for hundreds of miles. The soft little smile that had landed on Sam's face when he'd claimed to  _be good_ back in Dearborn has settled, deeply, into a taut neutral line, an ugly look on his beautiful face. As if the passing fields and trees and exits have impressed something into that briefly-hopeful mind of his. Dean isn't fooled—he knows he's been watched, too, for those same hundreds of miles, though Sam likes to think himself sly.

 

Things tend to congeal in the Impala. So much empty world to think in. Anything can become horrifying and terrible and real if one sits in it for too long.

 

Which is why Dean isn't the slightest bit surprised when he closes the door to their room, sets down his duffel, feels the weight of his favourite blade inside and is just about to reach down to it as if for a brush of comfort when Sam says, “We need to talk.”

 

“You okay?” Dean asks, pushing the blade inside the bag aside, searching instead for the canister of salt that he keeps wrapped up inside a pair of jeans. 

 

Sam doesn't answer. Dean grips the can of Morton and stands, turning.

 

He's standing in the middle of the room, and Dean thinks that he looks  _heavy._ Not physically—Lord knows the kid could stand to gain some weight. But he looks  _rooted,_ like his heels are sprouting roots into the flat ugly carpet. It takes him a minute to spot the switchblade in his brother's right hand.

 

Dean sinks quickly into the mask he's been wearing for years, pushing his face to feign surprise.

 

“Whatcha doin' with that, Sammy?” he says, in his best joking tone. 

 

Sam swallows hard. Dean sees his hand clench around the blade, and he tries to lift it, but seems to rethink it, lets it drop back again. He takes a deep breath.

 

“I know about Manteca,” Sam says.

 

Dean has to say he's impressed. Not a tremor in that lovely voice. It's hard, cold, determined. He feels a twinge of pride.

 

He has the feeling of playing cards, of hustling pool. “Don't know what you mean,” he says, sweetly, too sweetly. That's a mistake. Sam lifts the blade, points it towards him, though without any real conviction.

 

There are tears in his eyes now, and Dean wants to say, oh, kiddo. You're killin' me. Immediately the excitement of the blade in his hand is gone. Dean feels that ugly, stubborn love curdling in his stomach and the mask drops a fraction.

 

“I know about Manteca,” Sam says, “and Cold Oak. And I know about the shifter in North Dakota.”

 

“Sam—”

 

“Don't  _fucking_ lie to me,” Sam snaps, and Dean closes his mouth.

 

Dean holds up his hands, knowing it won't do a damn thing for reconciliation—lowers himself very slowly onto the edge of the bed.

 

He considers, for a moment, keeping up the act. But he knows what Sam's seeing out the corner of his eye right now, hell, every moment, and it's all fire and rape and laughter, and something about that—something about it's not right—playing Sam like a fool, when his brain's a practical mass of scrambled eggs. 

 

And it's been such a long time. And he'd definitely felt it, in Michigan—the  _knowing_ that it was almost, almost—

 

“Okay,” Dean says, gently. “Why don't you put that down, and we'll talk.”

 

“No.”

 

“Sammy.”

 

His lower lip is trembling. Oh, poor thing. Sometimes Dean forgets that he's the only one who's known, really, these last ten years. Forgets that Sam goes to bed every night with no idea he's sleeping next to a body that wants to kill him.

 

“Put it down,” Dean says, “okay? And we'll talk about it.”

 

“There's nothing to talk about,” Sam says, his voice thin and watery. “I know what you did.”

 

“What did I do?”

 

He's curious, really. He remembers Not-Sam, that thing, pointing to his skull, talking about Sam's blinders. Wonders if the force of that Wall coming down was enough to knock those off, too. 

 

“I always knew,” Sam says, and that's surprising, until he continues. “Somehow. In the back of my head. I knew—”

 

The point of the knife is making Dean's stomach jump.

 

“Put that down. Okay? Just for a minute.”

 

“You killed all those people,” Sam says, voice full of cracks, ignoring him, clutching the knife so hard his knuckles are bright white. “You killed all those boys.” He laughs, a high, scared noise. “Why did you kill all those boys? Why did you—in Cold Oak, you  _touched—_ ”

 

“I had to,” Dean cuts out, viciously. It surprises him. The wetness in his eyes surprises him, too.

 

It must surprise Sam, as well, because his arm loses all its tension immediately, the knife swinging down at his side.

 

They stare at each other, miles away from one another across the flat ugly carpet.

* * *

 

“I met this kid,” Dean says.

 

Sam is on the opposite bed, his back to him, his face to the wall. In his peripheral vision Dean sees the horrified slope of his shoulders. The knife is closed and far away, on the table across the room.

 

“I met this kid,” Dean says, “and he looked just like you. Not  _just_ like you—but enough. You know. Like if I squinted—there you were. And I missed the hell out of you. So I fucked him. I fucked him, I pretended it was you. And then he left.”

 

The only sound in the room is the ticking of the analog clock, a stupid homey thing in this piece-of-shit two-bed so far back in the boonies the only living things for miles around are the cicadas. The cicadas and Sam.

 

“And I got— _so angry._ Like, scared-myself angry. I thought  _it ain't fair,_ is it,  _that you, and now this kid, you can leave me like that._ And I kept—I kept finding you. In these bars—and taking you home—all these kids, these boys, and they thought—they thought I was just another guy, you know. Someone they could  _leave._ ” He feels the urge to crack his knuckles and sees Sam flinch in the corner of his eye.

 

“So I killed them. And then I killed more. And then I killed more and more.”

 

It seems that Sam has frozen. But Dean can feel him listening. He himself—sitting on the bed, thinking of broken teeth—he's trying to feel the electric waves of Sam's horror, trying to turn them inside-out and feel them properly. It isn't working.

 

“I had to. Do you get it?”

 

Sam says nothing.

 

“When you died—in Cold Oak, when you died, all I could think was, fuck. This guy, this  _nobody,_ this  _freak,_ he stabbed you in the back, he cut right through your spinal cord. And you died on the ground, right on top of me. And I kept thinking, fuck. I've been killing you for years, and someone else got to do it first.”

 

“Jesus Christ,” Sam says, in a shivering whisper. “Please stop talking.”

 

“I didn't—I didn't get it, not at first. When I went to Hell I thought they'd carve it out of me. But they didn't.” He turns, the better to look at Sam's long lovely spine, hanging down in despair over his legs. “I figured it out down there, Sammy.”

 

“Please stop.”

 

“Dad always told me. He always told me.  _Look out for Sammy._ He told me, if you can't save him, you're gonna have to kill him. And he thought—I know he thought it was the blood, but he didn't get it, he didn't get it like I did. I can't save you, Sammy.” His face is wet; it's been a long damn time since he  _felt_ this much. “Never could, could I? I figured that out, in Hell. I figured it out, Sammy. I can't make things better, not here, in your brain, in your soul, but I can—I can kill you, I can do that.”

 

Sam goes still again, still and silent.

 

“Sammy?”

 

Nothing.

 

He considers explaining it further. How he loves Sam so much he wants to peel himself inside out. How everything will be better, for both of them, when it's done, finally. He remembers holding Not-Sam's throat in his hands and squeezing, the look of bliss on that thing's face. 

 

It's a good hour they sit there, in silence. Sam immobile. Dean letting tears dry cold on his face. 

 

He isn't sad. On the absolute contrary. It's almost euphoric—finally letting it be said. 

 

Letting his ugly, bloody love come tripping off his tongue into his brother's ear. 

 

When Sam finally moves it's like a  _crack_ that ripples through the universe. When he finally begins to turn, Dean watches his eyes—the way they linger in the empty corner of the room—watches his lip twitch, his face flinch infinitesimally. Something's over there, talking to him. His eyes skip over it, and when they land on Dean they're bloodshot and wet, and Sam stares him down, fierce yet somehow broken, like someone staring down a snorting bull.

 

“You really think that?” he says.

 

Dean nods, simply, no longer bothering with words, because it's true. He knows it's wrong. God, he's always known it's wrong. But worse still is seeing Sam suffer like this, enduring it all these years. He's read about those nurses in certain hospitals who kill their patients to end their pain. He knows Sam has, too. Angels of Death, they call them. Dean's no angel, and certainly no messenger. But he knows how to use a belt and a fist and a blade to put an end to pain and he knows Sam knows that too and all there is left to do is wait.

* * *

 

The breeze outside is warm. Dean walks down to the lobby, hands in pockets, to bum a cigarette from the man behind the desk. It's the first time in years he's indulged that habit. The gears and cogs of everything around him are clicking into place. It's only fitting.

 

Sam is waiting for him by the car when he gets back, a sharp-cut silhouette against the orange sky. Dean hands him the cigarette when he gets close enough, and Sam takes it with shaking fingers. Drags on it while Dean opens the trunk.

 

“I meant what I said,” Sam says, smoke billowing from his lips. “In Michigan.”

 

“I know,” Dean says. “I'm happy. I am.” He is. The thought of Sam in pain makes his heart twinge. Reminds him that he has a heart. It's a terrible combination.

 

He finds the knife he wanted. Closes the trunk. Sam looks at it for a long minute, shakily breathing out smoke. He reaches forward, touches its flat with his fingertips.

 

His eyes drift back up, then, to Dean's face, and he makes a horrible sigh, and it's full of  _understanding—_ sadness, and understanding, and—most unexpected of all—love.

 

“How long have you felt like this?” he asks, his eyes chips of streetlight. “How long have you been—carrying all of this?”

 

“A really long time,” Dean says. “A really, really long time.”

 

Sam drops the cigarette on the concrete and smashes it with his heel. He looks at Dean a moment longer—a deep, blackened moment, the wind blowing, the sun falling, rapidly, as if hurrying from the scene of the crime. 

 

Then he reaches down and takes Dean's hand, the one free of a blade, and folds his fingers into it, and turns his body, and leads him up off the asphalt into the gaping hole of the room's dark door.

* * *

 

Sam stops inside, and from behind him Dean watches him reach up smear tears off his face. 

 

“I don't get it,” Dean says. The knife feels heavy in his hand.

 

Sam is quiet for a minute, facing the vast black room.

 

“When I was soulless,” he says, very softly, “I knew. Everything. Like—the bones in your arm.”

 

Dean, unsure of what else to do, slides the knife into the waistband of his jeans, and listens.

 

“I remember you—in the bathroom, with your hands around my—his—my throat. And I remember thinking, I don't want to die. I remember  _him_ thinking that. Or me. I don't want to die—but if he kills me—”

 

Sam laughs, facelessly, and it sounds like a groan. 

 

“It'd just be perfect, wouldn't it,” he says, with finality. “You and me. Like that.”

 

Dean watches his head turn infinitesimally to the left—attuned to some invisible voice. Watches a shudder run through his spine though the light from outside is rapidly dimming. 

 

“Do you love me?” he whispers.

 

He turns around, and Dean doesn't bother answering. He knows it's tattooed on his face in screaming ink.  _Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes._

 

Something like relief hurtles across Sam's face.

 

He does the strangest thing.

 

He smiles.

* * *

 

“911. What is your emergency?”

 

Here he is—kneeling in the gore-soaked sheets of a nowhere motel, between two long, naked legs. Hot, slick intestines coiled across his thighs. His mouth cherry-red. 

 

“I killed my brother,” Dean says into the plastic mouthpiece. “I think you better send someone.”

 

He hangs up, drops the phone onto the bed. Leans forward, on all fours, over Sam's naked, ruined body—split down the middle, organs dropping out into the cradle of his pelvis. His eyes are wide open, staring into the corner where, Dean hopes, nothing else from Hell will ever sit to laugh at him again. His mouth is just as cherry-red as Dean's—insisted to be kissed while Dean stabbed him in the stomach, one, three, seven, ten times. Left big red handprints on Dean's shoulders from gripping him hard, like a frightened child clasping its mother.

 

But he wasn't scared. Dean knows. The light in his eyes never went out, not once.

 

Dean looks down, at the mess of guts in his naked lap, and pushes them away. Picks up his knife and reaches into Sam's opened corpse, reaching up through organ tissue, behind the ribs. Blood and bile oozes down his arm until he finds it—cuts it free, fumbling with the knife. He drops the blade and grips it, pulling it out.

 

He's seen human hearts before, but none, he imagines, so taut, and red, and lean, and beautiful, as Sam's.

 

Suddenly he feels like crying, like sobbing, like screaming. He's so  _happy._ Manic, frantic  _glee._ Finally, finally, after all those surrogates, all those years, all that dreaming, all that craving, finally he's done it—finally Sam is safe, Sam is dead, Sam isn't hurting anymore, and  _he did it._ He kept his promise. No one else can ever take him away anymore. He's got his heart in his hand, he loved him so much, he loved him to death, and all Sam wanted was to be kissed while he bled—sweet, smiling, perfect Sam, all his, for  _always._

 

He finds himself holding the heart against his face, breathing in that damp copper smell, feeling all the holes and stretches of muscle—finds himself turning his head to sink his teeth into the meat—his mouth fills with blood—Sam's blood—sweet—he pulls it out, puts it down, leans back over Sam's body to kiss him again, and again, and again, smearing his face with the colour of his own insides, pushing a hand into the mess of organs below him to feel that quickly-receding heat. It's like nothing he's ever felt before. He could die here, he'd be happy. 

 

Distantly, very distantly, he hears the sirens, and sits back on his haunches like a coyote, head snapped towards the window where blue and red lights are beginning to intrude upon the country darkness. He looks down at Sam, at the knife nestled between his stomach and his kidneys, and reaches down for it, finds his face in the shining surface.

 

It's just a trick of the turning light, but for an instant, his eyes are black as coal.

* * *

 

When the door breaks down, Dean is sitting at the end of the gore-covered bed, eyes fixed on Sam. Jeans, boots, a long-sleeve shirt buttoned neatly at the wrists. The officer can hardly shout “Freeze!” before his bloodstained hands are in the air.

 

He hears one of the officers stumble out to puke, but two more come in, flashlights glaring over the lovely glistening remains of Sam's body. Someone grabs Dean's wrist and yanks him off the bed onto the floor, no ceremony, no rights being read. 

 

Dean doesn't resist. Merely turns his head against the carpet to get a glimpse of Sam's limp white hand hanging off the bed, Dean's torn skin built up under the nails like graveyard dirt. It's the last thing he sees of him. It's beautiful.

 

Lights are blaring, yellow tape is flying when they shove him out of the room and into the clean air of the nighttime. Immediately he hates it. He wants to be back inside the hot dark humid place, like a womb, where Sam's body is. Wants to lay down in its viscera. Everything inside the cop car is cold. The cuffs on his wrists may as well be made of ice. Dean lets his tongue rest on his lower lip, tasting that bloody sweetness for as long as he can.

 

No one speaks to him as they drive off, sirens wheeling. Fifteen minutes in the direction of the nearest town they have to stop so that the deputy can vomit onto the side of the road.

 

Dean is feeling light-headed.

 

He must nod off, because his head hits the window hard a few moments later, and the car stops. He finds his reflection in the black window—he's pale as milk. Eyes huge in the skull of his face.

 

The door opens and he nearly topples out into the arms of the deputy, the one who'd stopped to puke. The officer shoves him back into the car, leans in, grabbing at his bloody face the better to see it.

 

“The fuck is wrong with you?” he says, but Dean can only grin in response.

 

The deputy puts his hand down on the seat to steady himself and immediately snatches it back, cursing. The blue lights, the red lights show the bloody handprint he's holding up.

 

He calls for his partner, but Dean doesn't catch the name. His eyes are feeling heavy. A moment later the shackles are coming off and someone is pulling his arms forward, ripping open the buttons on his cuffs, pushing up the fabric to reveal the long, straight slits gushing blood all the way down Dean's arms—elbow to wrist.

 

“Aw, fuck,” the deputy snarls, the whole world pursing and closing and snapping off on the insides of Dean's eyes.

 

Dean drops his head back against the cold hard seat with the last of his strength. Pictures Sam's dark beautiful wide wide open eyes. 

 

Laughs, laughs, laughs.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
